(This blog has been updated from its original version published in 2007. The Team at ChurchandCulture.org thought you would enjoy reading it again as we approach Christmas.)

Several years ago a film crew from our church hit the streets of Charlotte to produce a “man on the street” video asking people “What comes to your mind when you think of the Christmas story?”

Number one answer?

“The movie.”

Yep, the 1983 “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid” tale from 1940’s Indiana of a nine-year-old boy’s desire for a Red-Ryder Carbon-Action 200-Shot Range Model Air Rifle BB-Gun (and, lest we forget, with a compass in the stock).

An intriguing editorial in Time magazine at around the same time chronicled how A Christmas Story has become the quintessential American film for Christmas, replacing It’s a Wonderful Life. Titled “Generation X-Mas,” it chronicled how an “upstart film became a holiday icon for the post-boomer set.”

As for George Bailey?

“Not so into him anymore.”

In a 2006 Harris poll (and I haven’t found one more recent), those from older generations picked Bedford Falls, along with Macy’s (Miracle on 34th Street) as their favorite film destinations.

But respondents a bit younger, from 18 to 41 years old, granted the “major award” to Scott Fargas, Flick and the Bumpus’ dogs - hence this season marking the 14th year (with steadily rising ratings) of the 24-hour marathon on TBS come December 24-25.

This is one of the “pop-cultural shifts,” suggested Time – such as football overtaking baseball, salsa defeating ketchup – that “signal bigger changes.” Perhaps because it’s everything It’s a Wonderful Life is not – “satiric and myth-deflating, down to the cranky store Santa kicking Ralphie down a slide.”

Or, as Time noted, perhaps it is because of the changing relationship between the community and the individual. Whereas the older films position Christmas as that which “uplifts the suicidal, raises every voice in Whoville, [and] renders peace between Macy and Gimbel,” A Christmas Story “inverts the moral.”

Now it’s the individual Christmas experience that matters. Getting the BB-gun, instead of protecting the local Savings and Loan for the poor, is the point. Or as Time put it, “It’s the individual Christmas that matters. Bedford Falls can take a hike…[it’s not about] angels’ getting their wings. Christmas is about the kids’ getting their due.”

But perhaps we can go where Time could not.

The great divide between It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story is more than just the radical individualism that marks our day, but what has spawned such individualism.

The real divide between the two films is that one retains the idea that Christmas is about the birth of Jesus, and one does not. Unless I have missed it, A Christmas Story does not have a single reference, symbol, picture or event that would suggest Christmas is about the birth of Christ, or has religious significance of any kind.

It’s a Wonderful Life, on the other hand, was rich in Christian idea and ethos, from traditional Christmas songs celebrating the birth of Christ (the climax of the movie is marked by the spontaneous outburst of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”) to the central character of an angel.

A Christmas Story is marked by the complete and total absence of anything religious at all, much less Christian. No nativity scenes, no church services, no Christian music – even the department store, Higbees, honors the season not with shepherds or wise men, but with characters from The Wizard of Oz.

Yet this reflects more than the choice of one movie over another. An analysis of 48,000 hours of programming by the NRB (National Religious Broadcasters) in December of 2002 (again, a study I have not found repeated) found that 90 percent of programming did not have a significant spiritual theme. 7 percent had a religious or spiritual theme, but did not refer to Jesus or the biblical story of His birth.

Jesus was the focus of only 3 percent of all Christmas programming.

Yet I confess that A Christmas Story has become one of my favorite movies. The nostalgia of the time, and the way it reveals how Christmas often “works,” runs deep and familiar. But when I watch it this season, along with millions of others, I will remind myself that while it is a Christmas story, it is not the Christmas story.

For that I would need to return to Bedford Falls.

Or better yet, the little town of Bethlehem.

James Emery White

Sources

“Generation X-Mas: How an upstart film became a holiday icon for the post-boomer set,” James Poniewozik, Time, December 10, 2007, p. 90, read online.

National Religious Broadcasters analysis can be found in the Winter 2004 edition of Enrichment, and also on the website of Preaching Today (a service of Christianity Today magazine). The website for the NRB is www.nrb.org.

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